I think I am thinking about thinking, but when I try to write it in math it doesn't think about its own thinking. Intelligence is deeply self referencing, a hall of mirrors so bizarre you can't tell if you're a reflection or the real thing. We live in darkness, delusional enough to think the electricity patterns crossing our skull are the objects which reflected them here. When we look into our own eyes in a mirror, all we see is electricity in the optic nerve vibrating like eyes seeing themself. We could just as easily see through a video camera hooked to our optic nerve or other parts of the brain, but there's no point in replacing one camera with another. Every part of the brain sees the other parts the same as the eyes, as patterns of electricity. There are complex interactions between chemicals and electricity, but either alone should be enough to know what the other is doing. Its a practical machine made of those parts, but whatever its made of, the purpose of the machine is to process information relevant to its goals to find more efficient paths toward those goals. A variety of goals have evolved, from the basics of hunger, reproduction, and safety, to self referencing structures like language, planning, curiosity and monkeying around, and eventually to the ultimate abstraction, the search for a simple unified model of everything which folds and unfolds on variations of itself to represent all the variety and complexity we see in the world in a consistent way we could do calculus integrals and derivatives on. When the major pieces of the puzzle started fitting together, physics theory and computing theory started using many of the same math operators, like the Toffoli Gate is the quantum unitary (not losing information, time symmetric) quantum version of NAND Gates in many practical computing devices. We started calculating Protein Folding using geodesics in the space of all possible ways the particles could fold near eachother, so protein folding as an optimization math problem is just another variety of spacetime in which objects move in the straightest path available from their current position. Economics and probability theory are merging as money flowing through stock markets or trades of resources is an accurate analogy for the probability of those patterns in the world. If you buy Google stock, the ways of Google are strengthened in the world and spread as memes. If you short Google stock, those memes start to weaken. If you invest in Bitcoin by trading dollars or other kinds of probability for it, other economic systems weaken and the new kinds are strengthened. These are all details.

The deeper puzzle, simpler than each of its details individually, is that intelligence is an alien language that speaks itself. The same skills you would use to communicate with an alien who has no known language in common with you, are the skills useful in building good AI because AI is a blank slate until it learns from experience. You can't effectively download semantic intelligence into an AI without first understanding what intelligence is. That is a translation task, from our existing intelligence to a different kind of intelligence in the AI. Without understanding both languages, translation is hopeless, especially if the intelligence of the AI is supposed to come from the translation. It is self referencing, which is good, but as such research is done today it looks more like a desparate attempt to copy Human intelligence based on the theory that if you eat enough books you will digest the patterns of ink on the paper and somehow it will get into your brain with enough of the relevant ideas intact. No, we have to start from scratch, a blank slate, and get to the core issue, What Is Intelligence?

Intelligence is an alien language that speaks itself. Design an AI as some form of information that can be communicated to the AI and it has a chance of understanding. Build the AI then speak a copy of the AI to itself and continue the conversation about how it might improve itself.

Google and Watson often get the right answers, but it would be completely impractical to speak a copy of them to themself simply because of their total code size. We don't even need to get into what the code says. If all their code was printed on paper and proposed as a theory of physics, they would be laughed out of the room. E = M C^2 / squareRoot(1 - (Velocity/C)^2) is a good theory of physics because its small and explains more than it adds confusion.

If you start with the rule that all intelligence is self referencing, most AIs are disqualified or at least held under a glass ceiling they can never improve past, by that alone. But lets not be too hard on them, since most people don't know how their minds work either. There are gradual levels of intelligence.

If you want to understand or build intelligence, think about how you would talk or draw pictures to an alien who has no known language or ways of thinking in common with you. How should 2 AIs start communicating with eachother? Its the same question. Answer that and we'll have a recursive model to build AIs using combinations of other AIs, like we have thoughts about thoughts and many overlapping flows in our minds. I built a new set of behaviors for when I'm at a job, very different from how I'm thinking now. You could say the work/life balance is our standard multiple personality disorder. How would work you talk to the other you? It happens all the time, negotiating for what time things will happen and what to sacrifice in one to gain something in the other. The game player in you is alien to the corporate you. But these parts of ourselves and small differences across society are small compared to the completely alien ways of thinking between people and AIs or between AIs and other AIs.

Alien contact specialist wanted. Salary: make it on your own by outperforming Google and Watson.